


Cards

by Mimsys



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Aphasia, Gen, and id flip if someone did that to me, bc im pissed at how the show's handling it, except for trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-22
Updated: 2014-10-22
Packaged: 2018-02-22 05:49:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2496797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mimsys/pseuds/Mimsys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fitz isn't broken; his aphasia doesn't need fixing. It'd be nice if he were treated as a person and not his condition- but he should have known that compassion left their team when Jemma did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cards

**Author's Note:**

> This is short and crap and this isn't what I meant to come out of this but the theme of AOS's take on Fitz's anomia is that aphasia = broken and I couldn't take it. Give him treatment and coping skills, not solitude!

It wasn’t that Fitz didn’t _want_ to get better; of course it wasn’t. He’d tried the different therapies that were meant to restore his language skills by addressing and compensating for his new impairments and raged at the lack of progress each one brought – if you could count fractured stammering as _raging_ ; Fitz had even tried the ones that Coulson suggested that didn’t do a damned thing for expressive aphasia and they didn’t seem to understand that that was what his symptoms pointed to. He had trouble finding words, which was anomia, a type of expressive aphasia, yet continued to instruct him to try therapies such as melodic intonation therapy, which had essentially had him sing everything he wanted to say. 

Another strategy worked better, in which verbs and nouns were matched to work on word retrieval, but that still didn’t do much but frustrate Fitz and certainly wasn’t as useful as the communication cards that Trip had suggested. The tools, which were laminated index cards with different symbols printed on them, had become essential to the scientist’s fractured communication, even more so than the assistive technology that they also tried. 

His teammates had learned that it was best not to finish his sentences, although there were times when it was needed for them to do so, and to reduce distracting noise when he was trying to focus on his speech; it hadn’t taken long for Fitz to understand that short, simple sentences were much easier for him to produce than complex ones and that it became more difficult when he was rushed or anxious. Learning was only half the battle. 

The other half was stumbling through speech, refusing the drugs that would improve blood flow to his brain to enhance the brain’s recovery rate and replace neurotransmitters, turned his nose up at the offers of memantine and piracetam, had worked with but then given up on the computer programs like StepByStep, Lingraphica, and Sentence Shaper that were meant to help, and continued to sink deeper and deeper into despair at the absence of Jemma.  


He relaxed slowly around the others, allowing Trip and Skye to slowly pull him out of his shell, although there was still days were he fumed at the memory of Jemma and refused to say anything to his team. His card that depicted ‘team’ changed from the SHIELD symbol to a picture of the lot of them, Simmon’s absence at his side notable and unwelcome; Trip’s picture was exchanged for Jemma’s on the card for ‘friend’, because it was too painful to leave it otherwise. 

Slowly, slowly, Fitz learned to wrangle control over his speech again as he convinced himself that aphasia was a condition to be managed, not cured. He wasn’t broken, regardless of what anyone said, and Jemma leaving him didn’t prove otherwise. 

Aphasia certainly changed him, but it didn’t make him any less whole.


End file.
